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Broadband Britain's milestones shattered

Graeme Wearden ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 19 May 2004 13:10 BST

BT's broadband services are now available to 90 percent of the population, which represents a significant marker in the drive to make high-speed Internet services universally available in the UK.

The telco announced on Wednesday that it has now upgraded a total of 2,652 local telephone exchanges to offer its ADSL product. Although this is only around a half of all its exchanges, it's enough to reach all but 10 percent of its telephony customers.

After suffering years of criticism over its approach to broadband, BT is keen to trumpet that it is now outperforming most of the rest of the world, according to figures published last week by the OECD.

"BT has put the UK at 90 percent ADSL coverage today with our closest competitor countries in the G7 aiming for this level by the end of 2004," said BT Wholesale chief executive Paul Reynolds.

"By that stage we'll be past 95 percent and well on the way to topping 99 percent by summer 2005."

BT has already warned that around 560 local exchanges are unlikely to ever offer ADSL, because they are too remote and serve too few people for an upgrade to be economically viable. Other technologies, such as wireless, could be more suitable for these places, many of which are in Scotland.

At 90 percent, BT's broadband network now covers twice as many businesses and homes as its main rivals, NTL and Telewest, combined. But the two cable companies are also enjoying broadband success.

Telewest said on Wednesday that it had signed up its 500,000th broadband customer. This compares to BT's estimated 2.4 million wholesale ADSL customers.

The lucky Telewest customer in question is Serena Davies of Bristol. She signed up for Telewest's 256Kbps product, but is being upgraded to a 3Mbps service for a year.

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10 comments

I am one of the 10% who still cannot get broadband... Adrian Ward
I live in Featherstone near the city of Wolverhamp... Mike Garner
I can only hope the upcoming Milton Keynes trial t... Phil Sefton
THE TRUE FIGURE IS NOT 90% If the cable from the e... David Glover
BT 6km range is a myth. I live about 3km from my e... Mike Wilson
There may be widespread coverage of Broadband in t... David Dundas
IMHO I think BT must be short for Butt which is wh... Anonymous
I live in Shareshill, which is about a mile up the... Chris Walker
I like the headline facts but what's the detail?... Robert Young
Satellite broadband is available as an alternative... Tristan Simmons

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Featured Talkback

Could it be that ISP’s are making this out to be a bigger problem than it actually is? We’re a small country with an internet penetration of less than 60%, for every Youtuber there’s someone who only uses the internet to check their emails, more people surf on their mobile handsets than a few years ago. Surely things should even themselves up.